Darwin and Buffon were not so much as named.  Mr. Wallace, on the contrary, at once raised the Lamarckian spectre, and declared it exorcized.  He said the Lamarckian hypothesis was “quite unnecessary.”  The giraffe did not “acquire its long neck by desiring to reach the foliage of the more lofty shrubs, and constantly stretching its neck for this purpose, but because any varieties which occurred among its antitypes with a longer neck than usual at once secured a fresh range of pasture over the same ground as their shorter-necked companions, and on the first scarcity of food were thus enabled to outlive them.” {260}

“Which occurred” is evidently “which happened to occur” by some chance of accident unconnected with use and disuse.  The word “accident” is never used, but Mr. Wallace must be credited with this instance of a desire to give his readers a chance of perceiving that according to his distinctive feature evolution is an affair of luck, rather than of cunning.  Whether his readers actually did understand this as clearly as Mr. Wallace doubtless desired that they should, and whether greater development at this point would not have helped them to fuller apprehension, we need not now inquire.  What was gained in distinctness might have been lost in distinctiveness, and after all he did technically put us upon our guard.

Nevertheless, he too at a pinch takes refuge in Lamarckism.  In relation to the manner in which the eyes of soles, turbots, and other flat-fish travel round the head so as to become in the end unsymmetrically placed, he says:—­

“The eyes of these fish are curiously distorted in order that both eyes may be upon the upper side, where alone they would be of any use. . . .  Now if we suppose this process, which in the young is completed in a few days or weeks, to have been spread over thousands of generations during the development of these fish, those usually surviving whose eyes retained more and more of the position into which the young fish tried to twist them [italics mine], the change becomes intelligible.” {261} When it was said by Professor Ray Lankester—­who knows as well as most people what Lamarck taught—­ that this was “flat Lamarckism,” Mr. Wallace rejoined that it was the survival of the modified individuals that did it all, not the efforts of the young fish to twist their eyes, and the transmission to descendants of the effects of those efforts.  But this, as I said in my book Evolution, Old and New, is like saying that horses are swift runners, not by reason of the causes, whatever they were, that occasioned the direct line of their progenitors to vary towards ever greater and greater swiftness, but because their more slow-going uncles and aunts go away.  Plain people will prefer to say that the main cause of any accumulation of favourable modifications consists rather in that which brings about the initial variations, and in the fact that these can be inherited at all, than in the fact that the unmodified individuals